Elsa Hart’s new historical mystery, The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, takes place in the competitive, high-class and high-stakes arena of Enlightenment-era collectors: wealthy men fascinated by the new science of naturalism who spent fortunes to acquire samples of flora, fauna and minerals from around the world. In this essay, she shares why this world made the perfect setting for a murder mystery.

Picture a tourist at the end of an overscheduled afternoon, limping from a blister on a sandaled heel (the dictionary at the end of the guidebook doesn’t include the word for bandage), sweating into clothes that have stretched out after days of wear, determined to cram one more experience into an overfull mind before the sites close. This is how I imagine the Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm when, on a tour of England in 1758, he visited the home of the collector Hans Sloane. Kalm poured his impressions of the day into a rapturous account of insects preserved in glass boxes, rare books lining walls from floor to ceiling, gemstones arranged in drawers and numerous objects from mummies to corals to snuffboxes. He lamented that he hadn’t had enough time to see everything.

In the early 18th century, before public museums became national projects in England, private collections like that of Hans Sloane were popular among those who could afford them. English ships were sailing ever farther from English shores and returning with plants, animals and objects never before seen on the British Isles. These same ships transported enslaved people and advanced colonial agendas across the world. In addition, profits from slavery contributed to the wealth that enabled collectors to amass as much as they did. Hans Sloane, for example, married into a fortune made from sugar plantations in Jamaica. Over the centuries, many of the objects from these collections have been lost or destroyed, but those that remain carry a legacy of exploitation and cruelty with which the museums and educational institutions that display them must reckon.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne.

Imagine a cabinet of curiosities and you may think of occult amulets and toothy skulls believed to be those of ancient dragons. The collectors of the early 1700s were still attracted to objects that provoked wonder and suggested forbidden magic, but after a century of turmoil in England, collections were beginning to serve a new purpose. To some thinkers of the time, they offered a means of putting the world in order. When the Scottish ship’s surgeon James Cunningham traveled to China in 1696, he received instructions on the proper methods for collecting and preserving plants, and was asked to procure not only striking and unusual specimens, but “the most common grass, rush, moss, fern, thistles, thorns, and vilest weeds.” The organized repositories that resulted from this systematic collecting would play an essential role in modern Western scientific inquiry. The reason that Pehr Kalm didn’t have time to see the whole of Sloane’s collection was that he spent part of the afternoon at a desk, squinting through the thick glass of a specimen jar to count the scales on the belly of a snake. It was a task assigned to him by his patron, Carl Linnaeus, whose species categorizations would become the foundation of the scientific naming system used today.

My own path to the world of the 18th-century collectors began when I was doing research for my first book. The letters James Cunningham sent from China helped me conjure a fictional English botanist blundering through the Chinese borderlands. They also introduced me to the collectors who waited eagerly for Cunningham’s crates of specimens to arrive in England. These collectors and the coterie of naturalists, apothecaries, artists and charlatans in which they operated, inspired The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne.

I knew that I wanted to write a mystery. I have an abiding attraction to this genre that explores malevolent, chaotic, evil human impulses within a tight storytelling structure of puzzles and patterns. And my research into the lives of the collectors gave me ample material with which to build a tale of murder. The same curiosity, knowledge and dedication that inspires the best collector can become the obsessiveness, arrogance and unscrupulousness that corrupts the worst. It was a competitive community prone to feuds and betrayals. The death of one collector was an opportunity for others to scavenge an unprotected collection, and in some cases absorb it entirely into their own. It was also a controversial community. In the eyes of conservative Protestants, collecting represented an impious dedication to the vulgar and the strange. To some members of the nobility, collecting was just another tasteless attempt by the newly wealthy to rise in the ranks of society. Periwigged gentlemen complained in coffee houses, calling Sloane a “Master of Scraps” and deriding his collection as a “knickknackatory.”

In The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, the crime takes place during a tour of a collection. This was an idea that came from my research. I wondered, as I pictured the exhausted traveler Pehr Kalm tallying the scales of the cobra specimen, what a lone researcher separated from a group might have glimpsed through an open door. Perhaps he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. And as I thought about the other visitors wandering the rooms, disoriented and overwhelmed by the dense displays, I imagined how difficult it would be for them to recall the day’s order of events. What a happy circumstance for a murderer that would be.

Author photo by Virginia Harold.

In Murder in Old Bombay, debut author Nev March transports readers to 19th-century India as her sleuth, Captain Jim Agnihotri, investigates a crime inspired by a real-life mystery. In this essay, March explores how the tragic death of two Parsi women and the shadow of a mutiny loom large over her novel.

History is ever present in our lives. As a teen living in Mumbai, people sometimes asked me, “Are you Muslim?”

I’d reply, “I’m Parsi.”

“Ah!” My interlocutor’s eyes would light up with understanding.

India is a comfortable mix of religions (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Baha'i, Zoroastrianism and more) and regional groups. Many know that Parsi Zoroastrians are descended from medieval Persian refugees who took shelter in India.

The travails of my tiny community impacted decisions both big and little. Major decisions included the expectation that girls would marry within the community. It also impacted minor decisions, like traveling alone. Among other stories, the death of the Godrej ladies in 1891 became a cautionary tale in our family.

An 1891 postcard circulated to build support for a petition to the high court shows Bacha Godrej and Pilloo Kamdin, and the Rajabai Tower where they died. Image courtesy of the author.

The well-to-do Godrej girls were sisters-in-law. The elder, Bacha Godrej, was the 20-year-old bride of 22-year-old law student Ardeshir Godrej. His 16-year-old sister, Pilloo Kamdin, was married, but had not been sent to her sasuraal (her husband’s home). That afternoon, they’d climbed 200 steps up the university clock tower. On a sunny afternoon, first Bacha, then Pilloo dropped to their deaths. An altercation was witnessed between some young men in the hour before their death, but lack of evidence led to an acquittal. With no answers, a frenzy of conjecture and outrage erupted.

For the survivors of the tragedy, life was never the same. Devastated by the loss of his bride, Ardeshir Godrej threw himself into his work and is now famous as the inventor-founder of the global conglomerate Godrej Enterprises. He did not remarry. Despite two petitions to the high court, each with tens of thousands of signatures, the mystery of Bacha's and Pilloo's deaths was never solved. While researching my novel Murder in Old Bombay, I found a letter to a newspaper editor written by that widower, Ardeshir Godrej, and resolved that this would be the inciting incident to launch my detective’s quest. As my novel opens, Captain Jim Agnihotri recuperates in a hospital bed and reads about the case in the newspapers. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he’s puzzled at the odd circumstances. When he reads widower Adi Framji’s fervent letter to the editor, he becomes determined to solve the mystery.

Thomas Henry Kavanaugh being disguised during the Siege of Lucknow, Indian Mutiny, 1857. National Army Museum, London.

Other aspects of the history of 19th-century India drove the events in my plot. Although the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny occurred 30 years before the events in my novel, that slaughter would be still in living memory at the time. In that first disorganized bid for India’s independence from Great Britain, Indian soldiers (sepoys) in Bengal, Cawanpore (now Kanpur) and Jhansi rebelled, killing many of their white officers. In response, Bombay regiments marched north to quell the rebellion. In the 1890s, the mutiny would have been vivid in people’s memory, from the burn of defeat to a confusion of divided loyalties. These simmering resentments form the backdrop of Murder in Old Bombay and influenced its plot twists.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Murder in Old Bombay.

Within my Parsi community, the ever-present danger to women became codified in that simple phrase, “Remember the Godrej girls!” a century after their deaths. It resonates even today, in the outrageously high number of crimes against women. Alas, we find that historical fiction isn’t historical at all, and may not be entirely fictional.

Anna Lee Huber always knew that her Lady Darby mysteries, which are set in the 1830s, would eventually reach the cholera epidemic of 1832. What she couldn’t have known was that she’d be writing A Wicked Conceit, in which sleuth Kiera Darby must solve a series of crimes in a disease-stricken Edinburgh, while the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting Huber’s own life.

Illness is nothing new, and neither are epidemics, for that matter. Yet very few of us living in the developed world have experienced a pandemic. We’ve read about them in history books, but we haven’t experienced the strain and uncertainty and immediacy of dealing with one—until now. 

When I first began writing the Lady Darby mysteries and decided to set the first book in August of 1830, I always hoped the series would last long enough for the characters to reach the year 1832. But while I was aware that my characters would eventually have to wrangle with the cholera epidemic that struck Britain beginning in late 1831, I had no idea I would be writing about it while enduring a new pandemic in our time—nor could I have predicted how my own personal experience with a pandemic would inform not only my understanding of the past but also our present predicament.

First I had to confront the methods used for controlling a pandemic and treating disease in 1832 and how they differ from those we utilize today. Our scientific and medical knowledge has progressed immensely in 188 years. For one, we now understand that viruses and infections like cholera are caused by germs and not by miasmas.

In 1832, miasma theory was the predominant medical theory held by the brightest minds of the age to explain how diseases spread. The belief was that bad, noxious air emanating from things like rotting corpses, marshy land areas and other putrid matter actually released vapors that caused people to fall ill. This “influence in the atmosphere” was also believed to afflict those who had weakened themselves by exposure to certain behaviors, places or “exciting causes.” These theories promoted the idea that only people of “irregular habits” should fear diseases like cholera. So in addition to avoiding noxious air, doctors prescribed preventatives that were supposed to keep you from contracting dreaded diseases.

One of the most useful measures was the establishment of the first Central Board of Health, which was based in London with branches in other cities throughout Britain. The World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control are the modern equivalents of these Boards of Health. Also, much like the regular televised coronavirus briefings held in 2020, the 1832 Central Board of Health published the Cholera Gazette to disseminate information to the public in an organized manner. Broadsides were posted that advised people of what foods to eat, how to clean themselves and their homes, and how to be mindful of the weather and the suitability of their clothing. Buildings in infected areas were even cleaned and whitewashed.

Quarantine measures were rarely recommended because cholera didn’t seem to spread by contagion but by personal contact. Contagionism was a precursor to germ theory, so it conflicted with the accepted concept of miasmatism. Quarantine was unlikely to have been effective anyway because the bacteria that causes cholera is not airborne like the virus that causes COVID-19. We now know that the reason cholera outbreaks kept recurring despite all the Central Board of Health’s efforts was that they failed to address the true source of the disease: open cesspools throughout communities.

It wasn’t until 1854, when Dr. John Snow was able to trace the source of a single cholera outbreak in London to a specific water pump, followed by a decadelong fight for germ theory to overtake miasma theory, that the real cause of cholera was pinpointed and accepted. Once significant sanitation improvements were made and uncontaminated water supplies were created, cholera became largely eradicated from many parts of the world, though areas without these two crucial elements still struggle with the disease.

While writing for an audience now familiar with the masking and social distancing protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was important to communicate the differences in methodology between the medical community of 1832 and today. However, the feelings of dread, fear and misgiving that people experience during such times of crisis were as present in the past as they are today. The desire to make sense of such a calamity, to understand its cause and to draw some sort of meaning from it, was just as strong. 

Some people in 1832 found healthy ways to grapple with these issues and emotions, while others responded with anger and vitriol. Pamphlets from the time railed against people’s sinful natures and called on the government to change laws to save people from their own iniquities, correlating the concept of contagion with the idea that cholera was divine punishment for intemperance and immorality. Others even blamed doctors for allowing or causing people to die of cholera so their bodies would be available for dissection in anatomy schools. This fear ultimately resulted in violent cholera riots throughout Britain and Europe. 

But not everything that can be gleaned from our study of past pandemics is dire or disheartening. In fact, there is great comfort to be found in realizing we have been through difficult times like this before, and we’ll get through them again. Chaos and uncertainty may reign for a time, but humanity will eventually prevail. Science and social understanding will be advanced. We’ll emerge with a better understanding of the past, and hopefully of ourselves and others. As an author, I now have a greater empathy for the characters who inhabit my pages and the misfortunes I inflict on them.